if buffalo hipsters — that’s a pretty funny concept to begin with — don’t listen to the goo goo dolls, what do they listen to? andy difranco or whatever his name is? the tragically hip? why they’re so hip they took their name from a 40 year old martin mull comedy routine. the absence of a real music scene in buffalo — and i’m not talking about aging wanna-be’s who work in offices during the daytime and put out discs with their own money — wouldn’t be so apparent if people didn’t insist on talking about the music scene in buffalo. this thanksgiving, i’m giving thanks for the complete lack of vision here that has allowed places like chapel hill, austin, athens, seattle, minneapolis and, yes, even cleveland to flourish as musical meccas for the past, oh, 40 years or so.

Nobody’s saying Buffalo is music central, nor does it need to be. But with places like Soundlab, Mohawk Place, Towne Ballroom, Sportsman’s , Hallwalls, and, of course, the venerable Nietzsche’s (just scratching the surface), I think we have plenty of interesting music passing through town. And that’s enough for me. We get so many intriguing concert notices where I work that we wonder who would have time to check them all out.

But what I don’t get is the over-heated rhetoric–if Buffalo isn’t the greatest ever for x (music, art, architecture, whatever), then it sucks. It’s not, and it doesn’t.